In a silver halide color photographic light-sensitive material, a color developing agent such as, for example, an aromatic primary amine-type compound, is used to develop the exposed silver halide grains, and the color developing agent's oxidized product produced in the development then reacts with dye forming couplers, whereby a dye image is formed. In this method, in order to form an image composed of cyan, magenta and yellow color dyes, a phenol-type or naphthol-type cyan coupler, a 5-pyrazolone-pyrazolinobenzimidazole-type, pyrazolotriazole-type, indazolone-type or cyanoacetyl-type magenta coupler, and an acylacetamido-type or benzoylmethane-type yellow coupler are used.
The above-obtained dye image may sometimes be stored being exposed to a light over a long period of time or may, although exposed for a short period, sometimes be stored in the dark over an extensive period. In such instances it is known that the dye image becomes significantly discolored depending upon the storage condition thereof. Generally, the discoloration in the former is called photodiscoloration or light discoloration, while that in the latter is called dark discoloration. In order to preserve semipermanently a record image obtained by use of a color photographic light-sensitive material, it is required that the overall color balance in discoloration of the three-color dye image composed of yellow, magenta and blue dyes be retained as in the initial balance state by keeping down such the light or dark discoloration to a smallest possible degree. However, the degree of the light or dark discoloration differs according to the respective yellow, magenta and blue dye images, so that there has been the inconvenience that after an extensive period of the storage thereof the overall color balance of the three colors tends to be lost, thus deteriorating the quality of each dye image.
In addition, in the case of a magneta coupler, the yellow stain in the color-undeveloped area due to a light, heat or moisture is significant as compared to that in the case of a cyan coupler or yellow coupler, so that there has been the inconvenience that it deteriorates the quality of the resulting dye image just as the discoloration does.
For the purpose of solving such problems, techniques to improve them by specific coupler combinations are disclosed in, e.g., Japanese Patent Examined Publication No. 7344/1977, Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication) Nos. 200037/1982, 57235/1984, 117249/1985, 232550/1985, and the like.
Even in those coupler combinations, however, since the color balance in the light or dark discoloration tends to be lost and the yellow stain tends to appear, the overall image preservability is not adequate, and further there arise other problems that the color balance in the color development process is deteriorated, the color reproduction is inadequate, and so forth. Thus, further improvements have been requested.